Local: Grow Mobile Yoga - A Tacoma On-Site Yoga Service
Today, Laura (the amazing lady that I have had the pleasure of spending the last 10 years with) is launching her first business right here in our hometown of Tacoma, WA. I wanted to take a moment on here and share a bit about her and the rad yoga company she has founded.
Laura was born and raised here in Tacoma by a family full of teachers. Her mother, father and both of her sisters all have spent their entire lives teaching in public education throughout the Pacific Northwest. Like myself, she didn’t want to do what her parents did. She wanted to carve her own path, and for years she says she was, “very sure that she didn’t want to be a teacher.” Throughout the years she, “worked a bunch of different jobs, from retail to accounting and wasn’t passionate about any of them.” Several years ago she lost her job, “which had become her identity” and she found herself at a low point, unsure of what she should do.
While juggling several nannying gigs in an attempt to cover her bills, she found herself stuck choosing between the few jobs that were available to her. “None of them seemed very fulfilling”, she described. While discussing what her next move was I was like, “Hey why don’t you take a moment and actually consider what you really love doing? Like, imagine that you have no financial responsibilities and all the time in the world, what would you choose to do with your life?” The answer was immediately obvious to her. After years of practicing yoga, she knew wanted to find a way to teach yoga.
Like every good story, the universe seemed to perfectly align for her after that. She found her way almost immediately into a local yoga teacher training less than 2 weeks later at Expand Yoga in Tacoma, and 3 months later she had her YTT 200HR certificate. As soon as the training ended, we left on a long term traveling trip through Vietnam, where we rode a motorbike from Hanoi in the North, all the way to Da Lat, in the south. Da Lat is awesome by the way, read about it over here. On that trip is where Laura actually started teaching yoga. She was able to teach students from all over the world and after 2 ½ months living and teaching abroad, we headed back to Tacoma, inspired and ready to get started on her new career.
Over the next several years of traveling and teaching yoga all over the world from Spain to Maui and even right here in Tacoma, Laura slowly began formulating the concept for her own yoga business. The idea was simple, make yoga more accessible for people by bringing classes into the places where people are already going (workplaces, schools, gyms, care facilities, etc.) This would not only measurably improve the health and overall wellness of the people she worked with, but it would be a great way to create new great paying jobs for other yoga teachers in the area. After we discussed a million names, she finally landed on the name Grow Mobile Yoga, and began the early stages of planning her on-site yoga service.
Being a new woman entrepreneur, Laura reached out to all of the top female owned mobile yoga companies in the world and through listening to their experience and expertise, she came up with a plan and realistic budget to launch her own yoga company here in Tacoma. She needs to raise a minimum of $6000 to cover the bare essentials (insurance, licensing, equipment, products, marketing, website, etc) of the first year of the business. While teaching yoga has been extremely fulfilling for Laura, it has not been a financially lucrative endeavor. “If I was in this for the money, I never would have started. My whole purpose is to help people create better, healthier lives for themselves and the people around them, and now I’m reaching out to my community and asking for your support to help me do the same”.
To support Laura and help her new company “Grow" you can donate to the campaign on GoFundMe HERE. Whether it’s $1, $10, $100 or $1000, every donation makes an enormous difference. Another easy way to contribute is by sharing the GoFundMe link in a post on social media, a message to a friend or an email to a coworker. By sharing and donating you will help fund her dream and allow Laura to create a sustainable wellness company dedicated to making our little corner of the world a better, healthier place. Thank you for your support and helping Laura launch Grow Mobile Yoga!